Running a national startup festival would be a big job at the best of times. Doing it with a newborn at home and a toddler in tow is another level entirely.

But that’s the reality for Danielle Seymour, director of SOUTHSTART, who is preparing to lead the event just weeks after welcoming her second child.

For Seymour, this year’s UN Women Australia International Women’s Day theme, Balance the Scales, isn’t an abstract concept. It’s something she’s living in real time.

The system wasn’t made for women

Seymour says the conversation around gender equality in business needs to start with a simple truth: many of the systems founders operate within were never designed with women, particularly mothers, in mind.

“It means being honest about who the scales were built for in the first place,” she says.

“I’m 30. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and a baby born in December. In two weeks I’m running SOUTHSTART, Australia’s startup and innovation festival. I haven’t taken maternity leave because the infrastructure for founders who are also mothers largely doesn’t exist.”

“There was no real option to step back. So I didn’t.”

Seymour says she’s not framing this as an inspiring personal sacrifice; it’s just reality.

“I’m not saying that to be inspiring. I’m saying it because I think we need to stop treating that kind of situation as a personal choice and start recognising it as a structural one.”

The invisible imbalance founders face

For many women in business, Seymour says the imbalance isn’t always dramatic. Instead, it shows up unrealistic expectations.

“It shows up in the gap between what’s expected and what’s actually possible, and the fact that women are still largely left to quietly manage that gap alone.”

Seymour says in the startup world, the pace rarely slows down.

“The startup ecosystem doesn’t pause. Capital cycles don’t soften. SOUTHSTART doesn’t move because I had a baby. The baseline expectation of constant availability and visibility doesn’t shift, which means the adjustment has to come entirely from me.”

That pressure, she says, reveals a deeper issue around how leadership is still defined.

“There’s also still a version of leadership that gets rewarded. One that assumes no one needs you at 3am for reasons unrelated to a product launch.

“That model wasn’t designed with mothers in mind, and most industries haven’t meaningfully updated it.”

Why founders need structural support

If Seymour could change one thing overnight, it would be the lack of formal support available to founders who are also parents.

“Genuine structural support for founder-parents,” she says. “Employees have entitlements, but founders have nothing unless they create it for themselves.

“If we want more women building companies and staying in the game long term, that has to change.”

She also believes we need to rethink the way we celebrate founders pushing through extreme pressure.

“The norm I’d challenge is the one that frames surviving this kind of season as admirable,” she says. “It shouldn’t require admiration. It should just be supported.”

Drawing a line between work and life

For Seymour personally, balancing business and family this year means being deliberate about how she shows up at work.

“I’m committing to staying in control of how I show up to work,” she says. “That’s not a phase, it’s a line in the sand.”

For her, the priorities are clear.

“Nothing matters more than my relationships offline. If work starts to meaningfully interfere with that, it’s worth questioning.”

At SOUTHSTART, that mindset is also shaping how the organisation operates.

“It also means building something genuinely resilient – a team and culture that doesn’t depend on any one person, including me, running on empty to make it work.”

Leadership shaped by circumstance, not gender

While conversations around women in leadership often focus on gendered traits, Seymour takes a different view.

She believes the qualities people often attribute to female leaders are really the result of experience.

“I’m not sure being a woman has shaped my leadership style. Circumstance has. Necessity has. Those aren’t the same thing. People assume ‘being a woman’ is what made you adaptable, resilient, pragmatic … whatever leadership qualities you have.

“But those qualities came from what you’ve been through and what you’ve had to figure out, not from gender itself.”

In fact, she argues that framing these traits as inherently female risks masking the structural issues behind them.

“I believe that conflating gender with those experiences is part of the problem,” she says. “It naturalises difficulty as a female trait rather than naming it as something the system created.”

SOUTHSTART takes place in Adelaide from March 17-19, 2026. Find out more here.

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